


here lie our histories

by jollypuppet



Category: Persona 3
Genre: Angst, M/M, kind of a happy ending tho i promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 10:01:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jollypuppet/pseuds/jollypuppet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's when they're very young when the first, small, inconsequential part of their friendship dies spectacularly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here lie our histories

**Author's Note:**

> I know I've written for a lot of different things, but I'm being completely and totally truthful when I say that there's really no pairing that means more to me than this one. I write so rarely for it because I really just don't think I can do it justice, but I felt the weird need to tonight. So, here you go.
> 
>  
> 
> **This piece contains spoilers.**

It's when they're very young that the first, small, inconsequential part of their friendship dies spectacularly. Their crux, their origin suddenly disappears in a cloud of smoke and a rush of heat, and they watch a building burn black and fall to the ground together. That's when that first part of their friendship dies. Sanada Miki takes it with her.

After all, it belonged to her.

–

They don't see each other again for years – they try to keep in contact through letters, or the telephone, but nothing feels right. What was once there is gone, buried in an unmarked grave somewhere far away from the both of them. They lose each others' addresses. They make new friends, fleeting friends, friends that never feel quite as good as the first one did. They each keep a piece of each other hidden deep inside of themselves, never daring to touch it, to look at it, to let it see the sun, lest it dredge up more pain and fear and sadness and _regret_.

Akihiko is alone on his birthday, and he stares at his hands, bandaged from a bad fall or from a fight or from climbing a tree, he can't remember. He looks at his hands, cut up and dirty, but he can't see the soil in the grooves of his skin, the red tissue that makes up his body. He sees ashes. He sees burns.

His next birthday will be like that, and the next, and the next and so on until his very first year in high school, until he's breaking noses and jaws and bleeding from his mouth and sweating under the lights of the gym and coaches from Gekkoukan's boxing team are eyeing him with eager curiosity, with a ravenous thirst for cruelty. His eyes are cruel when he looks at them. His smile is cruel. The air in his lungs feels icy and dry in his throat, cruel, unforgiving, _cruel_.

Nothing like a fire, but as close as he can manage to get without breaking.

–

Akihiko's the last one to leave the locker room after that competition. He packs his stuff up slowly, checks his phone once or twice for any texts from that Kirijo girl that seems so interested in him. His hands ache and they itch and he wants to fight, he wants to punch something, feel the energy of it reverberate through his muscles and his bones and up his shoulder into his back, spread out through his body. He could punch one of those coaches. He could punch a hole in one of these lockers, he could do it, he'd just have to angle his fist, put the right amount of force behind it, right in the center where the metal's the thinnest –

“You're not quite as scrawny as I remember you being.”

Another part of their friendship dies that day, when Akihiko whips around and sees Shinjiro standing there with that dark, confident look in his eyes, when that violence in him suddenly melts away and he feels like he used to at the orphanage, small and weak and helpless. Part of their friendship dies, because it doesn't feel like greeting an old friend. Sending another letter, making another phone call, that would feel like greeting an old friend, but when Akihiko hugs him with the force he wishes he could use to hug his lost little sister, pulls him close and breathes in his scent, spices and smoke and _then_ , it doesn't feel like hugging a friend. He's hugging a member of his family, a piece of his blood.

For the rest of the day, the ache in his hands doesn't remind him of burns.

–

Kirijo says he seems brighter, more relaxed. She says, with a certain note of trepidation, that he's less responsible, but Akihiko shrugs it off. He doesn't feel the need to fight as hard, to prove his worth to his muscles and his bones and his sinews. His hunger is quieter. His heart has taken a long-needed rest.

He introduces Shinjiro to Kirijo (“Honestly, just call me Mitsuru, how many times do I have to _tell_ you?”) and she's polite, judicious, sterile in a way that Akihiko will later know as judgment. She wants to see how Shinjiro walks, and speaks, and carries himself, and when the Dark Hour arrives and he steps just a fraction closer to Akihiko, she smiles at him.

“Good things come in threes.” she says.

–

Bad things only need to happen once, though.

It's the last Akihiko will see of Castor for a while, and Shinjiro packs his bags in the middle of the night and leaves. It's the only time Akihiko will ever see him truly scared, sheet-white and wide-eyed, clutching a backpack like it's the only thing tethering him to the life he so clumsily grasps onto.

The next morning, the murder is reported on the news. Shinji's long gone.

–

He gives him space, figures he'll come around, but he never does. What possessions Shinjiro left behind start to slowly disappear, Akihiko sees him less and less often, and when he does, his hair's longer, his eyes are darker, his back continues to curve and curve and curve like the weight of what he's done is pulling him down. His clothes are cheap and they smell like cigarettes, nothing like the smell he grew up with, and it's acrid and it burns his lungs, almost as if he can taste it like a fine sheet on his tongue.

He tries to tell himself that Shinjiro can handle himself, that he knows how to make his own decisions and that he'll always come back when he needs it. But he doesn't come back. He comes back less and less, in fact, until Akihiko doesn't see him for months at a time. He grows stronger as he tries to distract himself, his chest grows broader and the girls at Gekkoukan are beginning to notice him, but he's too distracted, constantly distracted, thinking _study, work, train, fight, sleep, eat, study, work, work, work._

One day, in the middle of the winter, while he's studying for a big calculus test he has the next day, that cycle gets suddenly interrupted by a single, anomalous, new thought, a quiet utterance of _Shinji_. He ends up having a panic attack in the middle of his room and thinks briefly about calling for help because _air is going out but it isn't coming back in_ , but it settles down eventually, his eyes stinging and the lights in his room suddenly much brighter than they were before.

He shuts them off and goes to bed, leaving his textbook open on his desk.

He fails the test.

–

He finds Shinjiro in a dark alley, curled up in a doorway, almost too shrouded by darkness to see. His large frame is awkward, all folded up like that, but he looks like he's comfortable, like he's been doing this for ages. Like he's used to it.

He wants to hit him.

“Get up.” he barks, and roughly wrests him awake. “Get _up_ , Shinji, I said get the fuck up, we're going back to the dorm, I'm not letting you sleep in an _alleyway_.”

He's not even awake, but he tries to talk back. “I don't _sleep_ here, you crazy bitch, I _told_ you, I'm just _napping_...”

Akihiko kneels down and grabs the sharp point of his chin, thinner and bonier and scruffier than he remembers it being, and wrenches it in his direction. “It's _me_ , you asshole!” Shinji wakes up, and there's a slow realization that alights in his eyes, something like shame or humiliation. The bags under his eyes are deep. He's thinner, his hair is longer, he looks at Akihiko and he looks crushed.

“Aki,” he says, with a dazed kind of affection, and then grabs both his wrists, “get your fucking hands _off of me_.”

They scream at each other for what seems like days, cats milling around in the dark peripheries of the alley, cars driving by, pedestrians hurrying past like nothing's happening. Akihiko swings, Shinjiro pushes him to the ground. Shinjiro ends up with a broken nose, Akihiko ends up with a split lip, and in the scuffle, in the dim light wafting through the alley like a miasma, a small container falls out of Shinjiro's pocket with an inconspicuous clink, one that he won't notice for a moment or two more.

Akihiko grabs it before he can, and he opens it. He doesn't know what they are, but he knows what they look like. He freezes, and he drops them, and he gets up, and he leaves.

When he gets home, he punches his punching bag so hard the chain breaks.

–

Ikutsuki tells him that they're suppressants. Not strictly drugs, not strictly legal. Akihiko doesn't give a shit anymore.

They still eat together, sometimes. They'll end up walking into Hagakure at the same time, and if he didn't know any better, Akihiko would say that Shinjiro waited around those parts on some days, just to sit next to him. They barely talk. They eat, Aki talks, Shinji grunts or asks meaningless questions, and they ignore the past like they ignore the rain coming down outside.

It changes when Akihiko asks him to come back. Or, when Akihiko asks him to come back and he listens. Shinjiro's surprised by it at first, because Akihiko's asked him to come back before, _begged_ him to come back, pleaded and cried and screamed at him to just live in the dorm, sleep on a clean mattress, take a shower, eat normal food, but it's always fallen around him like words meant for someone else, someone better. This time he hears it.

It's always been _we need you, the team needs you, the cause needs you_.

Akihiko pays for his bowl and says, “I need you.”

–

Akihiko's there when Shinjiro gets shot. When blood is dripping from his mouth, when Ken and Fuuka and Minato and the whole team are standing around like they're watching some horror film, _their friend is dying, he is_ _ **dying**_ _._

Shinjiro smiles at him for the first time in years. That bullet ripped out his guilt, that iron in his mouth is the taste of forgiveness. He's finally rid of it.

The last of their friendship dies that day, and all Akihiko can taste is ashes.

–

He goes into a coma. The surgeons mention something about the bullet hitting some important organ or mass of tissue or bone or piece of his soul, and how they were able to take it out, but at a cost. Shinjiro is weak. He sleeps through Armageddon, he sleeps through Chidori's and Takeharu's and Minato's and Ryoji's deaths, he sleeps through the grief, and Akihiko's glad. He doesn't deserve it anymore.

Shinjiro is infinitely stronger than he is. He battled his demons directly. He looked them in the eye and stood there, stared at them, until they finally mauled him to pieces. Akihiko was off trying to find some way to get around them, to become better than them, and here he is, with nothing but the smell of death around him.

Shinjiro wakes up on a warm day of sun, after a long week of rainy days. Akihiko and Mitsuru tell him the news. He doesn't seem surprised, or if he is, he doesn't show it.

A week later, he's making his way back to the dorm, slowly. It's just a temporary residence, until they can find a place to stay, and he limps a bit, unused to the movement of his legs after so much inactivity, but when he's leaning on Akihiko's shoulder, he asks if they should live together. Akihiko thinks they should.

They turn nineteen together, and twenty, and Shinjiro will occasionally bake a cupcake and Akihiko will sometimes buy booze, and they live into their twenties together, their pasts long and dead behind them. They live together, and they love what they have left. They rebuild their small little lives quietly. They don't bother anyone.

“Goodnight.” one says to the other. “Love you.”

“You too.” comes the reply. “See you in the morning.” 


End file.
